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Hopefully you've heard the news about the Drupal Association's new D8 Accelerate grants program, and the fundraising drive we have currently going on. If not, the gist is that the Drupal Association has created a central fund, managed by the Drupal core committers, to fund both "bottom-up" community grants for things like targeted sprints or "bug bounties," as well as "top-down" spending driven from the core committers on larger strategic initiatives that help accelerate Drupal 8's release. All D8 Accelerate grants that are provided are tracked centrally at https://assoc.drupal.org/d8accelerate/awarded, including what the money was used for, how much was spent, to whom it went, and a report from the grant recipient(s) that outlines the work that was accomplished.

However, it can be a little hard to parse from that format the larger meaning/context of this work, especially if you don't spend upwards of 30 hours per week in the core queue like most of these folks. :) As Chief Wearer of Many Hats™, I sit on both the Drupal Association board as well as the committee who manages these funds. This puts me in a good position to provide a bit of "behind the scenes" info on how the funding process works, as well as provide some of the larger story of how these funds are benefitting not only Drupal 8 core, but the larger Drupal ecosystem.

DrupalCon Bogotá just finished up, and critical issue-wise we've managed to stay in the 50s for a few days (down from a high of 150 in the summer of 2013!), so now seems like as good a time as any to write down what's left to ship Drupal 8!

This post will attempt to document all of the remaining 55 criticals (as of this writing), and attempt to offer a somewhat "plain English" (or at least "Drupal English" ;)) description of each, loosely categorized into larger areas in which we could really use extra help. There are over 2,600 contributors to Drupal 8 at this time, please join us!

(Note: These descriptions might not be 100% accurate; this is my best approximation based on the issue summary and last few comments of each issue. If I got the description of your pet issue wrong, please update your issue summary. ;))

Up-front disclaimer: I work for Acquia. However, I was not involved in the creation of Acquia Certification and had no insight to the test beforehand apart from a single sample question. I'm also writing this on my personal blog, rather than Acquia.com, because these are *my* thoughts/impressions, and haven't been vetted by anyone else. :) Carry on!

I've seen some Drupal module developers out there have a lot of trepidation about moving to Drupal 8, most often via hearsay from others or via occasionally dipping in to look around and being spooked by newfangeldy stuff like namespaces, object-oriented code, and weird directory structures.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments against the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA), which dictates at a federal level that the word "marriage" means only a legal union between one man and one woman. The topic of marriage equality is often very contentious to "family values" people.